The hardships of life?

"¡Que frío!" That was the taxi driver last night. We had just arrived at Vigo station and wanted to get to one of our local cafes before it closed. We knew that they would sell us a bottle of milk so that there would be milk for our coffee this morning. "Well," we told him, "compared to minus several degrees and snow on the ground, it's actually quite nice." 

 Everything, as I have a said many times before, is relative. And, let's be fair about this, the temperature down at the roundabout this morning was 3 degrees, which is not exactly warm, and there was a dusting of frost on the grass up on San Joan do Monte where I ran, en route for the breadshop. 

Getting to Galicia from April to October isn't a problem in the summertime but the flights from Liverpool to Oporto don't operate in the winter time. So we have to organise ourselves to fly from one of the London airports. As a rule this also involves flying to Oporto but there weren't any convenient, and conveniently priced, flights this time so we looked at other options. And so we ended up flying Heathrow to La Coruña. Or A Coruña as I must learn to call it. 

The flight left at 5.35 pm English time and, according to our information, was scheduled to arrive at 8.40 Spanish time. Imagine, therefore, our surprise when the pilot, making his captain's speech to welcome everyone aboard, said that we would arrive at A Coruña at 8.15, local time. And that is just what we did. Maybe the pilot pedalled extra fast. Maybe we had a following wind. Or maybe they just miscalculated the time when they put the schedule on the website. 

Anyway, it was convenient for us because the last train to Vigo left A Coruña at 9.10 and, had we arrived at 8.40 we would have been hard pressed to catch it. We had a contingency plan, a list of A Coruña hotels to phone if we found ourselves needing an overnight stay. As it was a taxi got us to A Coruña station in plenty of time and off we went. When we arrived at the Failde cafe, the place was full of football fans, enthusiastically watching a match on TV. 

As usual the Failde fed us copious tapas to go with our beer, preventing us from dying from hunger before breakfast this morning. Two beers, copious tapas and a large bottle of milk to take away cost us the grand total of €5.10. Amazing! I always wonder how these little cafes keep going. 

And then the match was over, a draw I think, and all the football fans, en masse, got up and left. Suddenly we were the only customers left and it was clear that hey were clearing up ready to shut up shop. Maybe the football fans had all been told that once the game was over they had to leave and that was that. Spain as a whole may stay up late but clearly at this end of Vigo this is not necessarily the case, even on a Saturday night. 

And this morning the sky was blue and the sun was shining, an auspicious start to our stay. Even if it rains tomorrow, it's nice to wake up to sunshine on day one. 

Today being Sunday and this being Spain, or at any rate Vigo, there are no supermarkets open and all we have in the flat is tea and coffee, half a loaf of bread, a few olives and, of course, a large bottle of milk. So we had to take ourselves out for lunch. 

These are the kind of hardships we can manage to survive!